My mother had eight kids and raised us well (in our unbiased opinion!). She homeschooled us in our early years, and taught us important things like how to make sloppy joes and fold fitted sheets properly, then sent us off into the world with good grace. It seems a little silly to single out Mother’s Day as just one celebratory moment, but this spring holiday is still a good occasion to gather the whole family and enjoy a meal together. This week I’ve been sharing the bright, colorful Mother’s Day brunch I hosted for my mother and grandmother, with simple food and one big special surprise — posters made of old family photos!

Here’s a little more about the party: what I did ahead, how I set the table, and what I served, including lemon sticky rolls and a breakfast potato gratin.

If you spend your days reading food blogs, flipping through food magazines, and browsing cookbooks, chances are good you run into a lot of recipes you want to try. But how to ensure you actually make the recipes and don’t just let them disappear into the depths of Pinterest or your recipe binder? This is the very simple system that works for me.

Q: How do I make a small batch of kimchi, enough to eat over two or three days? I have tried to make a small batch before and it ended up way too salty. I have tried several times with not much success. I am klutz in the kitchen. Can anyone help?

Meet Nick Evans, the King of Leftovers! You may recognize this gentleman as the mastermind behind such Kitchn recipes as these delicious Lemon-Thyme Chicken Thighs. Well, Nick has recently come out with an entire cookbook of tasty meals, all designed to fit into your busy schedule and use up handy leftovers — appropriately titled Love Your Leftovers.

Today, I’m grilling Nick about the contents of his pantry, his most-used kitchen tools (a $15 mini-zester!) and his advice for all of us busy, hungry, food-loving folk. Later this week, we’ll have a recipe from the book and a giveaway!

Despite trying to provide ample evidence here, nobody believes me when I say that I get no special pleasure out of weeknight cooking — and guys, it’s like my chosen career, which doesn’t bode well for those of us who are no place near a kitchen all day. In an ideal world it would be relaxing, a way to unwind as we talked about our days while snapping ends off asparagus and rinsing rice before we cooked it. We’d make food that surprised and delighted us, food that exceeded our humble weeknight expectations every time and righted all of the day’s wrongs. And then the dishes would magically wash themselves. In reality, weeknight cooking is usually about practicality; hurried and hastily chopped, and all too often with a 4.5 year-old having a hangry meltdown at my feet because he didn’t want baked potatoes with broccoli for dinner, he wanted spaghetti and meatballs. Please send in the violins.

Nevertheless, despite how wide the gap is between this ideal and my relative reality, I do try to close it, with varying degrees of success. And although I have little interest in helping preschoolers fulfill their life goal of subsisting exclusively on pasta and pizza, I am not immune to the occasional politely worded request. It’s from these two places that we had lamb meatballs last night and everyone was, for once, happy.